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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24890 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Remember the USS Liberty?

As much Israel discourse as there's been in the last 45 years, you never hear about the time the Israeli air force and navy attacked an American ship in broad daylight and killed 34 Americans, except from the most conspiratorially-minded places like /pol/ (and Brett Favre when he's being trolled by /pol/).

Why? This seems strange. One might think this is because it blends into the background of innumerable incidents that make up the Arab-Israeli conflict, and thus most people simply shrug and accept that, "yeah, shits really fucked over there," and leave it at that, but this involved Americans. You know, the people that matter. There's some dispute about what really happened and whether or not it was deliberate. It's not surprising that this would be controversial; it's surprising that this is not a real issue at all.

My tentative opinion is that it was a deliberate attack. The USS Liberty was a spy ship. It was not supposed to be as close to the coast as it was. Israel didn't want the State Department jeopardizing their OPSEC in the 6-day war, so they made sure the Americans had no eyes on the ground (or the water). It was probably the right decision tbh. US leadership decided that the incident wasn't worth making major foreign policy changes over, and so they went along with the Israeli cover-up.

you never hear about

Quite the opposite, I hear about it roughly six times a day. It's the most widely publicized attack on the US shipping since Pearl Harbor. Why? This seems strange, until you remember Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos!

I'm going to take a bold stance: 4chan is valuable.

Sure, it has an obvious signal to noise ratio problem. But I would say not worse than reddit (which is a powerful indictment of the reddit algorithm as it doesn't clearly outperform having no algorithm at all).

On the various boards at various times you can find various distributions of quality. The /pol/ board is lower quality on average than most, but it has it's gems in the mud.

Thanks to the kind and helpful multicultural band of ridiculous edgelords on /pol/ I have repeatedly been informed about the USS Liberty incident.

Outside of that cabal of edgy 4chan posters, I don't think I have ever encountered this incident. Normies don't know.

This is the third time I've heard about it in the last few weeks just on this site. It's a completely outsized amount of attention for a 50+ year old friendly fire incident. At this point it's time to let bygones be bygones about deliberate atrocities, never mind an accidental bombing in the fog of war.

The conspiracy theories are nonsense, too. There is no plausible rationale that would justify Israel taking the insane risk of deliberately attacking the United States, and "jeopardizing their OPSEC" 4 days into a 6 day war that was already being decisively won by Israel certainly isn't one.

Best conspiracy theory I've heard is the Israelis knew the Russians were getting US Intel and didn't want to tell the US they knew for intelligence reasons. So they stopped the ship from collecting the Intel the Russians were nicking in a way that could be explained as non-intel related. This also suggests why the US would assist in covering up the reason for the attack.

They wanted to conceal that they were executing POWs and Liberty was a surveillance ship. Also, there is a possible false flag angle (remember the Lavon affair?).

This actually ties in well to that recent overkill conspiracy theory post. Surely the Israelis had to have known the US would figure out they did it, did Egypt even have any airforce left by that point in the war?

If Israel expected the US to figure out they were responsible, they would have to be absolutely confident in American subservience to them, that they would take such an attack lying down. But if they were absolutely confident in American subservience, why do they care if Americans hear about them killing some POWs? Wouldn’t it just be easier to count on American loyalty to look the other way on POW executions, as opposed to relying on Americans to look the other way on sinking their own ship?

Any way you slice it sinking a US warship is more likely to piss off the USA than executing Egyptian POWs. So doing the former to cover up the latter is nonsensical. Classic overkill conspiracy theory

It’s not necessarily overkill. If the Israelis were confident that A) committing deliberate war crimes would piss off the Americans and cause them to drop their support, and B) attacking an American spy ship would be chalked up as an accident due to fog of war, resulting in no real change to the status quo, they—or more realistically, a single officer—could have decided the risk was worth it.

Afaik most of the survivors think that's what happened. You can suggest a better motive if you want, but these counterfactuals don't prove that they really thought it was an egyptian ship.

Most of the survivors were grunts with no understanding of geopolitics, why should their opinion carry any weight as to the cause of the incident?

Killing potentially 50+ US sailors to cover up something that countless US allies (and the US itself, if we’re just considering torture of prisoners) did regularly throughout the 20th century just doesn’t make sense.

Id be willing to wager that there are a lot of "grunts" who have a better grasp of geopolitics than the median State Department official.

After all its his ass that's on the line.

I agree it isn't as clear cut as obviously being an accident, given some credible Americans who say otherwise and claim to have heard the intercepts, however that explanation does not make sense. Attacking your own allies ship to cover you are executing POWs is going to be a much bigger deal and much more likely to lose their support. In other words if the US government covered for the Israelis deliberately killing their own sailors and intelligence operatives to make them look good, they would certainly have covered up Israelis executing POWs.

To me that is one of the biggest holes in the deliberate attack theory. There really isn't much nastiness they could have been doing that America would have cared about more than dead Americans and attack on their ship.

They must have hoped to pass it off as an Egyptian attack, I guess.

Not plausible. The Egyptian air force was wiped out in the opening engagement of the war, and the Israelis informed the Americans that they had attacked the ship just two hours after the attack took place.

Against an American Intelligence ship? The one they were concerned was intercepting their communications? If they can intercept your comms about torturing/executing POWs they can probably intercept your communications from your pilots saying Hey, this is a US ship (as indeed it was claimed happened, for evidence that it was a planned attack). And after passing over the ship multiple times so they can see what planes are being used?

The Israelis (if it was deliberate) must have been aware that the US would almost certainly be able to identify the culprits. The only thing that then makes sense is that they were pretty confident the US would not abandon them/attack them over it. But at that point intercepted comms about POWs should also not really be a concern.

None of the theories of why they would attack deliberately really hold up in my opinion. Which doesn't mean they didn't, just that whatever reason there was in that scenario might be lost to time. There are enough other discrepancies that do undermine the "obviously it was a simple mistake" narrative, to at least not make it certain.

The ship could have blown up and killed everyone on board instantly along with any evidence of intercepted communications.

But they didn't try to shoot down the US plane that did intercept communications either. Sinking the ship wasn't enough on its own. Which the Israelis should have known. It's a huge, huge risk. And there doesn't seem to be anything worth that risk they got out of it, that we know of.

Why were they executing POWs? How many?

They couldn't spare troops to guard them and wanted them to go on the offensive. Don't know how many.

At this point it's time to let bygones be bygones about deliberate atrocities, never mind an accidental bombing in the fog of war.

I agree we should do the former, but insisting on framing it as the latter makes it a bit hard. Surely the dead deserve for the truth to come out?

What truth? It’s a murky conjecture at best, lacking a clear motive. And the nationalistic pride baiting around it is so transparent. Why did they do it? I guess they just wanted to prove the greatest country on earth is a little bitch, sammy. Now what are you gonna do about it when you grow up?

I suggest you remember the maine instead.

I suggest you remember the maine instead.

The spontaneous coal combustion?

Are there still people who think spain perfidiously blew up the maine?

What truth?

The one in the documents that are still classified at the very least? If it's time to move on from the ship getting bombed, it's time to move on from these secrets as well.

Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos

Let's not do this, please.

I agree that some sort of "the juice" pun would have been better form but he's not wrong.

Quite the opposite, I hear about it roughly six times a day.

You need to start hanging out with other people than Nick Fuentes.

It's the most widely publicized attack on the US shipping since Pearl Harbor. Why?

Then why did I first hear about it from weird dissident spaces, and not tons upon tons of documentaries, and references from war movies like I did with Pearl Harbor?

This seems strange, until you remember Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos!

Or because unlike Pearl Harbor this was done by a supposed ally rather than a self-declared enemy?

There was a similar situation to USS Liberty, but that time Japan sunk a US naval vessel during peacetime. The difference between the famous "sneak attack" and USS Panay Incident of 1937 is that Japan, like Israel, took responsibility and paid reparations.

USS Panay Incident is likewise not much known.

IMO the USS Stark incident is a better comparison: a US frigate was hit by Iraqi Exocet missiles, killling 37 sailors during the Iran-Iraq war in 1987. While there was some diplomacy (and some accounts that it was deliberate), it wasn't viewed as a casus belli, although Iraq did end up paying reparations for it as part of a larger deal involving the whole Gulf War.

As opposed to the year later, where Operation Praying Mantis saw the US sink half of Iran's navy after USS Samuel B. Roberts hit an Iranian mine (somehow without loss of life), and almost fired on a Soviet ship that claimed to be in the area to "take pictures for history." A month later, USS Vincennes managed to shoot down a commercial Iranian airliner.

Honestly, I think the lesson is that fog of war is very real and it's quite likely that someone ordered the attack, and someone was aware it was an American ship. But these were quite likely different parties, quite possibly far apart, and making decisions hastily often leads to oversights.

Id just like to take a moment to appreciate USS Samuel B Roberts living up to both of her namesakes by embracing Leroy Jenkins as her spirit animal. One can only hope that after hitting the mine her captain's response was "at least we have chicken".

You need to start hanging out with other people than Nick Fuentes.

Never heard of her.

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